Month: May 2017

May 7, 2017 by admin·Comments Off on CloudSploit and Security in the Cloud : An Interview

Security in the cloud is beyond a doubt the most important criteria for enterprises migrating to the cloud. Security in cloud is a shared responsibility. While Cloud providers like Amazon have certain responsibilities towards securing the infrastructure, users need to be vigilant and secure their data.

There are companies which help users to ensure that their cloud environment is secure. One such company is CloudSploit. The founder of Cloudsploit, Matthew Fuller, was kind enough to answer my questions regarding cloud security, over email.

Matthew Fuller, Inventor and Co-Founder of CloudSploit

Matt is a DevOps Security Engineer with a wide array of security experience, ranging from web application pentesting to securing complex networks in the cloud. He began his security career, and love for open source, while working as a Web Application Security Engineer for Mozilla. He enjoys sharing his passion for technology with others and is an author of the best selling eBook on AWS’s new service – Lambda. He lives in Brooklyn, NY where he enjoys the fast paced, and growing, tech scene and abundant food options.

Here is our conversation

CloudSiksha: In your experience, what are the major security concerns of enterprises wanting to migrate to Cloud?

Matt:The biggest concern Enterprises should have with moving to the cloud is simply not understanding or having the in-house expertise to manage the available configuration options. Cloud providers like AWS do a tremendous job of securing their infrastructure and providing their users with the tools to secure their environments. However, without the proper knowledge and configuration of those tools, the settings can be mis-applied, or disabled entirely. Oftentimes, the experience that the various engineering teams may have with traditional infrastructure does not translate to the cloud equivalent, resulting in mismanaged environments. Multiply this across the hundreds of accounts and engineers a large organization may have, and the security risk becomes very concerning.

CloudSiksha: You are security company which helps people who migrate to AWS to be secure. What do you bring over and above what Amazon provides to users?

Matt:AWS does an excellent job of allowing users to tune their environments. However, while they provide comprehensive security options for every product they offer, they do not enforce best practice usage of those options. CloudSploit helps teams quickly detect which options have not been configured properly, and provides meaningful steps to resolve the potential security risk. We do not compete with any of AWS’s tools; instead, we help ensure that AWS users are using them correctly with the most secure settings.

CloudSiksha:AWS itself has services like Inspector, CloudTrail and so on. So can the users not use these services for their needs? How does CloudSploit differ from these? Or do you supplement / Complement these services?

Matt:AWS currently provides several security-related services including CloudTrail, Config, Inspector, and Trusted Advisor. The CloudTrail service is essentially an audit log of every API call made within the AWS account, along with metadata of those calls. From a security perspective, CloudTrail is a must-have, especially in accounts with multiple users. If there is ever a security incident, CloudTrail provides a historical log that can be analyzed to determine exactly what led to the intrusion, what actions the malicious user took, and what resources were affected.

AWS Config is slightly different in that it records historical states of every enabled resource within the account, allowing AWS users to see how a specific piece of the infrastructure changed over time and how future updates or changes might affect that piece.

Finally, Inspector is an agent that runs on EC2 instances, tracking potential compliance violations and security risks at the server level. These are aggregated to show whether a project as a whole is compliant or not.

While these services certainly aid in auditing the infrastructure, they only scratch the surface of potential risks. Like many of AWS’s services, they cover the basics, while leaving a large opening for third party providers. CloudSploit is one such service that aims to make security and compliance incredibly simple with as little configuration as possible. It uses the AWS APIs (so it is agentless, unlike Inspector) to check the configuration of the account and its resources for potential security risks. CloudSploit is most similar to AWS Config, but provides many advantages over it. For example, it does not require any manual configuration, continually updates with new rule sets, does not charge on a per-resource-managed basis, and covers every AWS region.

CloudSploit is designed to operate alongside these AWS services as part of a complete security toolset, and helps ensure that when you do enable services like CloudTrail, that you do so in a secure fashion (by enabling log encryption and file validation, for example).

Matt:CloudSploit has two main components. First, it connects to your account via a cross-account IAM role and queries the AWS APIs to obtain metadata about the configuration of resources in your account. It uses that data to detect potential security risks based on best practices, industry standards, and in-house and community-provided standards. For example, CloudSploit can tell you if your account lacks a secure password policy, if your RDS databases are not encrypted, or your ELBs are using insecure cipher suites (plus over 80 other checks). These results are compiled into scan reports at predefined intervals and sent to your email or any of our third-party integrations.

The second component of CloudSploit is called Events. Events is a relatively new service that we introduced to continually monitor all administrative API calls made in your AWS account for potentially malicious activity. Within 5 seconds of an event occurring, CloudSploit can make a security threat prediction and trigger an alert. The Events service is monitoring for unknown IP addresses accessing your account, activity in unused regions, high-risk API calls, modifications to security settings and over 100 other data points.

All of this information is delivered to your account to help them take action and improve the security of your AWS environment.

CloudSiksha:What are the dangers of providing you with a user account in AWS?

Matt:There is very little danger. CloudSploit uses a secure, third-party, cross-account IAM role to obtain temporary, read-only access to your AWS account. Even if this role information were compromised, an attacker would still not be able to gain access without also compromising CloudSploit’s AWS account resources. The information we obtain and store is also very limited in nature – metadata about the resources but never the contents of those resources.

CloudSiksha:Can you tell me something about how your software has been used by companies and what value they are seeing?

Matt: Companies using our product have integrated it in a number of unique ways. For example, using our APIs, a number of our users have built integrations into their Jenkins-based pipelines, allowing them to scan for security risks when making changes to their accounts, shortening the feedback loop between changes being made and security issues being detected. Other companies have made CloudSploit the central dashboard for all of their engineering teams across every business unit to ensure that security practices are being implemented across the entire company.

Individual developers and pre-revenue projects tend to use our Free option, and are happy with the value it provides. 20% of these users move on to a paid plan in order to have the scans and remediation advice occur automatically.

Medium-sized teams prefer the Plus account in order to connect CloudSploit with third-party plug-ins such as email, SNS, Slack, and OpsGenie.

Advanced users, those who like to automate everything in their CI/CD workflow, as well as larger enterprises prefer the Premium plan for its access to APIs and all of our various features and maximum retention limits.

CloudSiksha:I see you have multiple options with varying payments. Has any of your client shifted from one tier to another? What was the reason for them upgrading to a higher tier?

Matt: Expect to see a stronger focus on compliance. Besides the 80+ plugins and tests that we currently have, we are working to expand our footprint for more compliance-based best practices. In addition, we are launching a new strategy to get information sooner and react to it faster than any competing AWS security and compliance monitoring tool. Amazon released CloudWatch Events in January and a month later we had already taken advantage of those features. We plan to continue to enhance this Events integration, delivering ever more useful results to our users.